Shane Haggerty
As the era of social media took off nearly a decade ago, public relations strategies that involve email were predicted to go in the same direction as landline phones and print newspapers. But, something quite different happened. To put it best, a New York Times headline recently noted: “For Email Newsletters, a Death Greatly Exaggerated.”
Email has not died. In fact, e-publications can be an effective tool in your school communication playbook. According to that Times story, “Newsletters are clicking because readers have grown tired of the endless stream of information on the Internet, and having something finite and recognizable show up in your inbox can impose order on all that chaos.”
Making it ‘Readable and Engaging’
Your district’s e-newsletter can still be a way to reinforce messaging, build your brand and educate your community. But the content of these newsletters has changed, or let’s say it had better change if you want people to read them. Gone are the days of the long feature story or the ghost-written “message from the superintendent’s desk.” There are ways to make your emails readable and engaging, and if you want to be successful instead of becoming a victim of the dreaded “unsubscribed,” incorporate the following ideas into your e-publication.
What Are Your Outcomes?
Like any public relations project, the e-newsletter should have measurable objectives. First, determine if you have a large enough email database (along with a way to consistently collect more email addresses) to justify the time spent on creating a newsletter. Direct mail is still effective in reach. Even though it might not be as cost-effective as sending out a monthly email, you need to know what works best for your audience.
Next, think about what you want the content to achieve. Hubspot, an industry leader in email marketing, notes that e-newsletter content should be 90 percent educational and 10 percent promotional. At Tolles, our monthly e-newsletter, Ignite, certainly promotes student success and various events, but also serves as a place to educate about career-technical education, along with business and industry partnerships. It also provides a community job board to our subscribers.
Your goals should center around a call to action. E-newsletters are effective at driving traffic to your website or to other online platforms. Make sure you provide an option for readers to click for more information, but don’t overdo it. Hubspot suggests that if you want people to RSVP or register for an event, only push out one of those calls to action per e-newsletter.
Simplicity and Focus
What are you filling your e-newsletter with? Too much? Not enough? One thing social media and mobile technology have done is shorten attention spans. It’s no secret that email is most effective (for your goals and for your audience) when it is concise, visual and contains a call to action.
The goal of your e-newsletter should not be to stuff it with every bit of information available about what’s happening in your district. You cannot cover everything in your e-newsletter. Period. Instead, according to Hubspot, “Email, whether it’s a newsletter or not, needs one common thread to hold it together.”
Create a topic-based email newsletter so people know what to expect each time it’s released. If you’re in a large district, this might mean creating multiple e-newsletters that focus on what interests the various audiences you’re trying to reach. You could have an e-newsletter based on elementary topics or one for middle school, athletics, fine arts, ESL and so on.
Keep it Visual
Along those same lines, the content you choose for your focused and simple e-newsletters should be visual. This means using photos and even videos to tell your stories quickly. You don’t need an elaborate design, and copy should be minimal. Keep your newsletter free from clutter. Use strong photos, simple and powerful headlines, and graphic elements to reinforce your district’s brand.
Show Some Personality
Schools can be fun and witty, too. Often, we want to stick to that old institutional model with content that is matter-of-fact and technical. Your e-newsletter has to be engaging, so that means loosening up the status quo rules that might make you nervous about showing a personality. Let people see your humanity, and use the e-newsletter as an extension of your brand voice, which hopefully isn’t stale.
How can you show some personality? For Tolles, we have created Spotify playlists that tie into a monthly theme. Think about a “back to school” edition of your e-newsletter with a playlist of music that features popular tunes along that theme. Maybe you create a video content series that debuts each month first or exclusively in your e-newsletter. This gives people a reason to subscribe because they know they’ll see the content there first, and it also gives you a chance to create content with personality. Other ideas: incorporate Instagram photos (potentially crowd-sourced from staff, parents or students), run a photo contest or embed the “Tweets of the Month.”
Stay in Touch with Trends
Stay on top of trends in email marketing so you can adjust your design, content, subject lines and delivery strategies as people shift habits. Here are some good industry tips to know:
- According to Mailchimp, the education and training industry has an average open rate on emails of 23 percent with an average click-through rate of 3 percent;
- Remember that mobile phones will be the place more and more of your audience reads your e-newsletter. Make sure you’re using a service that is responsive and adaptive to both mobile phones and tablets.
- There is a debate about subject lines. Hubspot claims “creative” works better, while Mailchimp’s research shows “boring” is better. Perhaps finding a balance is the solution. We stick with “to-the-point” at Tolles, but we also try to avoid ALL CAPS, exclamation points or keywords that will get the e-newsletter trapped in spam folders.
Yes, e-newsletters are “clicking” if you concentrate on readability and engaging readers when creating them. So don’t toss email into history’s trashbin with telephone landlines just yet.
Note: Join Shane for his Pre-Seminar Workshop in Nashville, Next Generation Newsletters, on Saturday, July 11, 1-4 p.m. Register now.
Shane Haggerty is director of marketing and technology at Tolles Career and Technical Center in Plain City, Ohio. He can be contacted at shaggerty@tollestech.com. View copies of his e-newsletter Ignite.